


Homespun

by sophinisba



Category: Pushing Daisies
Genre: Backstory, Character of Color, Gen, Knitting, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:24:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Emerson discovered and rediscovered knitting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homespun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstgold](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=firstgold).



Although Emerson Cod was exposed to the craft of knitting from a young age, he did not come to know it as an art until many years later. His mother, Evangeline, was a minister's daughter who believed in hard work and humility but was forced by circumstances to earn a living at an advertising firm. Her paid work demanded so much creativity and ostentation that when she came home in the evenings her quiet personality took refuge in the repetitive action of working rough gray, black, and brown wool into set patterns, which she did not dare to alter.

She dressed Emerson in lumpy gray sweaters that were too long in the sleeves and too tight around his sturdy neck and torso. Even when the weather was mild she put sweaters and hats and mittens over his regular clothes and long underwear underneath them, which meant that even the trousers which might have fit him properly now looked ugly and overstuffed.

At school, the other children mocked young Emerson for his unfashionable habile. Already made miserable by perspiration and by the rub of stiff, scratchy wool on his skin, Emerson took to ignoring his fellows rather than try to argue or fight back. As the years passed, he kept more and more to himself and spent much of his time reading books in his own bedroom, where no one - even his mother - would disturb him with judgments about what he should or shouldn't wear.

Inspired by his dislike of bullies and his admiration for the solitary private eyes of his favorite mystery stories, Emerson decided to study criminal justice. Moved by a desire to be far away from his mother and her gifts and closer to the scene of his favorite films, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in courses at the California College of Careers. When Emerson Cod was eighteen years, two months, three days, seventeen hours, and thirty-five minutes old, he dragged a heavy trunk full of heavy woolen goods across the threshold of his new home, a cinderblock dorm room that he was to share with Clifford Lo, an exchange student from Hong Kong. Cliff's father was the president of a successful chain of clothing stores which he hoped to expand into the international market, and he had sent his son to America to earn a degree in international business administration.

Unlike Emerson's grade school colleagues, Cliff expressed his disdain for ill-fitting clothing not with ineffectual rude taunting but with direct action. He had the entire trunk shipped to a recycling plant where the fiber could be broken down and turned into lining for hiking boots.

"That way no one will have to be depressed by looking at those sad colors anymore," said Cliff.

"Are you kidding me?" said Emerson, who had been in class learning about how fibers from a crime scene can be sent to a lab and traced back to their manufacturer when his roommate had sent all his own fibers away to another manufacturer. "What the hell am I supposed to wear now? Are _you_ gonna buy me a whole new wardrobe?"

Clifford's intention, it turned out, was not to buy Emerson new clothes, but to design and manufacture them. For while his father wished for him to manage financial affairs, Cliff's true passion was for another aspect of the family business, namely, fashion design.

"It's okay you come another part of the country where it's cold and people dress ugly," said Cliff, "that's not your fault." Emerson chose not to tell him that his knit clothing was not normal where he had grown up either. "I come from another country and some things are different there too. That's all fine." He leaned in close. "But we're in L.A. now, motherfucker. We need to take advantage of what this city has to offer."

"And what's that?" Emerson asked.

Cliff's voice was soft and full of mystery when he answered, "Textiles."

Clifford Lo was full of enthusiasm for his new project. And while he had very little faith in Emerson's ability to choose fabrics or colors for himself, he did believe a man should at least be able to express an informed opinion about what he would wear. And so, the two young men set out together to see what was available, what was affordable (very nearly everything, with Clifford's father's credit cards) and, of course, what was fashionable.

It was on these trips to the textile factories and tailor shops of Chinatown - a place as unlike the scene of Roman Polanski's film as Emerson could have imagined, but not, for that, less exciting or wonderful - that the aspiring crime fighter first began to develop his taste for the aesthetic. With Clifford's help, he learned to distinguish between silk and satin, between aqua and teal, between purple and mauve. He learned that looking good in fuchsia floral prints was nothing for a man to be ashamed; rather, it should be a source of pride. Even when the two students disagreed violently over what constituted clashing versus complementary colors and patterns, Cliff appeared to take pride in the fact that Emerson held such strong opinions in the first place.

That Christmas, Emerson returned to his mother's house in the frigid Midwest dressed in the one outfit remaining from the wardrobe she'd given him - the one he'd been wearing when Clifford had done away with everything else. She embraced him and gifted him with a newly-knit, ill-fitting gray wool sweater.

And each year after that he would return home in his least favorite clothing to receive more of the sweaters that he hated. Each year he would grimace while thanking her, and put the sweater into a box with all the others, where it would lie untouched until the following Christmas. He continued to associate knitting with everything that was tragic and boring about his early life, while silk and corduroy were the things that made him happy to be an adult. After the two men finished their studies and Clifford returned to Hong Kong, Emerson was left without a personal couturier, but his desire for more fine ensembles gave him an added motivation to seek success in his chosen career.

In those days, after graduation and the departure of his friend, Emerson Cod found that his old favorite pastime of reading detective stories was no longer relaxing or enjoyable for him. Either he was bothered by their lack of realism - if only cases in the real world worked out so neatly! - or he was stressed by their resemblance to his workaday life. Why should he worry about the identity of a fictional killer when he was already worried about a real one? Gradually, he gave up this hobby and did not replace it with another one. He tried to fill up his life with hard work, but when business was slow, as it often was, his life filled up with tension and boredom instead.

It was during this period, when he had already established his own business as a private investigator but had yet to chase a suspect off a rooftop and onto a pie maker, that Emerson Cod took on the case that would change his leisure hours, his winter wardrobe, and his relationship with his mother forever.

It began with a call from a nervous-sounding lady who told him she wanted help in tracking a thief. Emerson asked her to tell him more of the details.

"I think it would be better," said the nervous woman, "if you came to the scene of the crime. You won't be able to appreciate the gravity of the problem until you see it with your own eyes - and feel it with your fingers."

The facts were these: over the course of the past three months, Gwendolyn Cadogan, the proprietress of Cadogan's Cardigans and More, had discovered nearly half the stock of her high-quality yarn (all those varieties that were displayed on the main shelves in the front of the store, not in Clearance Corner behind the books and needles) had gone missing. The reason it had taken Ms. Cadogan so long to notice the disappearance was that the thief, rather than leave the shelves empty, had surreptitiously replaced the stolen merchandise with other yarn in similar colors.

Although Emerson had initially been pleased with the prospect of taking on a case that did not involve death or marital infidelity, he now found himself disappointed - the reward could not be great for the theft from a hobby store owned and frequented by quiet old ladies like Ms. Cadogan - as well as physically uncomfortable. The temperature in the store was cool, but the sight and smell of so much wool brought back childhood memories that immediately caused him to start sweating.

"So what's the problem?" he asked her. "You've still got yarn. Sell some of that and you'll recoup your losses."

"But don't you understand?" said the yarn lady. Even when standing and facing him, she kept a project in her hands, glancing through her glasses at her knitting and then over them to look at the detective. "The yarn they took was hand-dyed, high-quality imported lambswool, cashmere and silk. What they left me with was cotton and" - she lowered her voice, lest she be heard by the customers sitting in her rocking chairs and knitting - "_acrylic_."

Emerson, perplexed, knit his brows.

"Come, detective. Look at this shawl I'm wearing. Run it through your fingers." It was one of the softest and most delicate things Emerson had ever touched, a lacy, flowing thing with a beautiful pattern that alternated all the colors of the sea. "A garment like this takes not only great diligence and artistry, but also cashmere, which I sell at forty-five dollars a skein."

For the first time, Emerson really looked around at the wares on display. He had not seen such a profusion of both vibrant and muted colors since his trips to Chinatown as a college student. He took a closer look and began to notice more differences between the textures of the yarns. Some were soft enough to slip through his fingers, like his client's shawl, while others were rough or consisted of multiple threads twisted together. Some sparkled and others seemed to draw the light out of the room. Some were thin as the threads of a spiderweb and others were finger-thick or uneven. Nearly all of them cost more than ten dollars a skein.

Apart from the yarns themselves, Cadogan had hung samples of knitting and crochet projects from hooks on the shelves. Emerson studied several scarves made from the same type of yarn.

"How come this one's even all the way across and this other one goes back and forth like that?" he asked.

"Knit and purl," she said softly. "Increased and decreased rows, that's really all there is to it. Will you help me, Mr. Cod?"

Fortunately for Ms. Cadogan and her customers, Emerson had paid attention in his classes, and it took very little work for him to trace the fibers and fingerprints. Ms. Cadogan helped him identify the discount craft stores in the area where the thief would have acquired her acrylic and cotton fillers. As she answered his questions, she continued to knit, and Emerson watched her. He'd become much more observant of others' behavior since becoming a private investigator, and he learned more about the process of adding stitches in a few hours with her than he had in years of living with his mother, who also knit constantly.

The thief, predictably enough, turned out to be an employee of one of the discount craft stores, a woman who frequently shopped (or at least browsed) at Cadogan's Cardigans, although not one of those who worked on her projects in the rocking chairs.

"Why did you do it?" Emerson inquired after securing her confession. "Why would you go to all that trouble just to get" - he looked around the piles of it he'd discovered in her basement apartment - "_yarn_?"

"You don't understand," said the woman, near tears. "When I don't have two needles and some yarn in my hand, I go crazy. My fingers move with it in my sleep."

"So knit with the damn acrylic. You've got as much of that stuff as you could ever want."

She shook her head. "It's not the same." She looked at him closely. "And I think you're starting to understand that, Mr. Cod. Once you've knit with the good stuff, once you've let it slip through your fingers and over the needles...you can't go back."

The disgraced knitter never went back to Cadogan's Cardigans and More, but Emerson Cod soon found himself going back there several times a week. Gwendolyn Cadogan and her rockingchair regulars taught him the basics of knit and purl and, more importantly, instilled in him the passion for quality yarn, just as Clifford Lo had taught him to appreciate fine fabrics years before.

Emerson came to love the easy way one stitch followed another. Patterns occasionally frustrated him, but nothing ever lied or tried to sneak away. The way his own simple, repeated movements turned a plain ball of yarn into a flat piece of fabric and then into a garment seemed to him perfectly logical and at the same time mystical. When he realized that he had spent more money on Gwendolyn Cadogan's yarn than she had paid him for catching the thief in the first place, he decided he didn't care.

That November, Emerson unraveled the sweater his mother had knit for him the year before. At the store, he received the guidance he needed to combine his mother's dark grey wool with a pattern of eight-pointed stars in amaranth cerise. That Christmas, he returned home wearing a well tailored sweater that, in Emerson's opinion, made a perfect match with his madras silk shirt.

"What's this?" said Evangeline Cod. "These aren't the clothes I made you, son."

"No, Mama. These are the clothes I chose and the clothes I made for myself."

"But how did you - how'd you work these stars into it?" She ran a finger over a row of them at his chest.

"Would you like me to show you?" He took out a pair of needles and two balls of yarn in complementary colors from his suitcase.

"Maybe I would," Evangeline said slowly. "That sweater looks awful good on you, Emerson."

"Thank you, Mama."

On Christmas Day she looked awkward as she handed him his present and he unwrapped a lumpy brown sweater, but he gave her a genuine smile as he held it up, thinking of how he'd transform it. "I've had my eye on some beige merino at the store that'll go just perfect with this," he said. He took out a book of sweater patterns and the two of them discussed how the design could be altered for a look more suited to Emerson's build and his personality.

From then on, although they continued to live far apart, Emerson visited home more frequently. They had both come to enjoy life more with their new or improved hobbies, and they enjoyed each other's company as well. On Christmas and birthdays, they gifted each other not with finished garments but with patterns and quality yarn. The scarves and sweaters were the least of it - they could be given away to clients, coworkers, second cousins and charities. It was the pleasure that came from the process itself was what they wanted to share.


End file.
